Imam
Hamza Yusuf: 'If you hate the west, emigrate to a Muslim country'By Jack
O'Sullivan, The
Guardian, 8 October 2001

Hamza Yusuf is arguably
the west's most influential Islamic scholar. Many Muslims find his views
hard to stomach, but he is advising the White House on the current crisis,
and today he will be talking to religious leaders in the UK. Jack O'Sullivan
meets him.

A few days ago, for reasons that
remain rather unclear, the FBI decided to pay a call on the home of Hamza
Yusuf. "He isn't home," said his wife. "He's with the president." The FBI
agents did not seem to believe her; they called the White House to check.
"He's got 100% security clearance," said the voice at the other end. The
FBI agents did not return.

Yusuf, an Islamic teacher, was indeed
with the president. At the meeting, he advised Bush that the military term
Operation Infinite Justice was blasphemous to Muslims. The president listened.
He said he was sorry that the Pentagon, which chose the title, had no theologians
on staff. The name was changed.

Then, after joining in with God Save
America, Yusuf stood outside the White House and delivered an unequivocal
message, which even Margaret Thatcher could not fault. "Islam was hijacked
on that September 11 2001, on that plane as an innocent victim," he said.

Imam Hamza Yusuf, who runs an Islamic
institute in California, is fast becoming a world figure as Islam's most
able theological critic of the suicide hijacking. This afternoon he will
address British religious leaders at the House of Lords on the subject.

His speech will upset many Muslim
radicals here. A charismatic and popular speaker, Yusuf openly declares
his belief that Islam is in a mess. He wants Muslims to return to their
"true faith", stripped of violence, intolerance and hatred. Nor does he
pay much deference to the states in which many Muslims live. When we meet,
he declares: "Many people in the west do not realise how oppressive some
Muslim states are - both for men and for women. This is a cultural issue,
not an Islamic one. I would rather live as a Muslim in the west than in
most of the Muslim countries, because I think the way Muslims are allowed
to live in the west is closer to the Muslim way. A lot of Muslim immigrants
feel the same way, which is why they are here."

His rise to prominence is even more
extraordinary given his unusual background. Hamza Yusuf, 42, started life
as Mark Hanson, son of two US academics, only converting at 17. Thirty
years ago, he seemed destined not for Islamic scholarship, but for the
Greek Orthodox priesthood. Then, a near-death experience in a car accident
and reading the Koran diverted him towards Mecca.

But he cannot be easily dismissed
as a western patsy, a "collaborator", as his opponents have already dubbed
him, or as Bush's "pet Muslim". Trained for more than a decade by the best
Islamic scholars in the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco and Mauretania,
Yusuf's learning commands considerable respect, particularly with the English-speaking
elites of traditionally Muslim states. Although he calls on Muslims to
see what is good in western society, he has a long track record of criticising
western decadence, injustice and impoverished spirituality.

"He confronts what it is to be young,
British and Muslim," says Fuad Nahdi, publisher of Q-News, the Muslim monthly
magazine. "He shows there is life beyond beards, scarves and halal meat.
He inspires confidence that you can build Islam in the west from all the
local ingredients. You do not have to include political or theo logical
burdens from traditional parts of the Muslim world."

Grainy videos of his sermons sell
in their thousands and hint that he is not cut from the same cloth as teachers
from the Indian sub-continent or Arabia. His goatee beard is almost fashionable.
Sporting a turban plus an American accent, he is curiously familiar. Could
he be that singer from the Monkees, I wonder momentarily. However, in the
flesh, his angular features, intellectual intensity and learned, didactic
style recall another American icon: Malcolm X.

Yusuf has just arrived in Britain
from Rome. Shaking my hand, he buzzes with excitement after attending an
inter-faith procession for peace. "It was the feast of St Francis of Assisi,"
he says. "It was such an ironic choice. Did you know St Francis persuaded
the Pope to let Christians make a pilgrimage to Assisi instead of going
on the crusades?"

We sit cross-legged on rugs on the
floor of a suburban Buckinghamshire house. It is home to his old friends,
white British converts to Islam. It is October but tea, delicious dried
mangoes and dates are served in a room hot enough for a desert nomad.

The imam quickly turns to the World
Trade Centre attack - an act of "mass murder, pure and simple". Suicide,
he says, is haram, prohibited by the Koran, as is the killing of innocent
civilians. He quotes Koranic texts demonstrating that the suicide bombers
do not qualify as martyrs. He even finds a verse outlawing flag-burning.

"Many Muslims seem to be in deep
denial about what has happened," he says. "They are coming up with different
conspiracy theories and don't entertain the real possibility that it was
indeed Muslims who did this. Yet we do have people within our ranks who
have reached that level of hatred and misguidance."

Indeed, he sympathises with Margaret
Thatcher's statement that British Muslims have not been loud enough in
condemnation. "There may be some truth in it," he says. "Some Muslims tried
to explain what has happened. But if you say you condemn something and
then try to explain the background, it can mistakenly sound like a justification,
as though this is their comeuppance."

His hard-line attitude to extremists
in Britain would be unsayable for any mainstream politician keen to retain
any respectability. "I would say to them that if they are going to rant
and rave about the west, they should emigrate to a Muslim country. The
good will of these countries to immigrants must be recognised by Muslims."

It is as though he has gone through
a second, possibly more radical conversion than the first from Christianity.
He regrets speeches he himself has made in the past, peppered as they were
with the occasional angry statements about Jews and America that are a
staple of much Muslim oratory. Days before the September 11 killings, he
made a speech warning that "a great, great tribulation was coming" to America.
He is sorry for saying that now.

"September 11 was a wake-up call
to me," he says. "I don't want to contribute to the hate in any shape or
form. I now regret in the past being silent about what I have heard in
the Islamic discourse and being part of that with my own anger."

His great concern is that Muslim
thinking has sunk into theological shallowness that allows violent fundamentalists
to fill the vacuum. Colonialism and successor powers, he contends, dismantled
the great Islamic learning institutions, leaving a poverty of great scholarship.

"We Muslims have lost theologically
sound understanding of our teaching," he says. "We are living through a
reformation, but without any theologians to guide us through it. Islam
has been hijacked by a discourse of anger and the rhetoric of rage. We
have lost our bearings because we have lost our theology."

He has been examining the backgrounds
of the extremists. The consistent feature, he says, is that they have been
educated in the sciences rather than the humanities. "So they see things
in very simplistic, black-and-white terms. They don't understand the subtleties
of the human soul that you get, for example, from poetry. Take the Iliad,
for example. It is the ultimate text on war, yet you never know whether
Homer is really on the side of the Greeks or the Trojans. It helps you
understand the moral ambiguities of war."

Yusuf's language has a rare cultural
fluency shifting easily between the Bible and the Koran, taking in, within
a few breaths, Shakespeare, Thoreau, John Locke, Rousseau, Jesse James,
Dirty Harry and even, at one point, the memoirs of General George Paton:
"Did you realise," he asks, "that Paton wrote in his diary on his first
day in Morocco, 'Just finished the Koran. A good book. Makes interesting
reading.' "

We finish our tea. Another convert,
Yusuf Islam, formerly the singer Cat Stevens, is waiting to speak to the
new arrival. I suggest to Yusuf that life could get a lot tougher now he
has broken ranks. "I will get a lot of flak from Muslim countries, because
times are so emotional they are losing the ability to reason things through."

What about physical danger? "Yes,
I think there is a real risk from ignorant people who have no respect for
divergent opinions. There are Muslim fascists who are intellectually bankrupt.
The only way they can argue is to eliminate the voices they don't agree
with."